The financially troubled states have had to come up with new ways to gather more revenue. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D) is close to signing a bill forcing New Jersey residents to pay a tax whenever it rains.

The reasoning for the new tax is to protect New Jersey’s streams, rivers, and bays from potentially toxic storm runoff from salt and lawn fertilizers. Most of the salt on the road comes to melt the snow and it is employees of state and local government’s who put the salt on the ground.

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Maryland, under Governor Martin O’Malley (D), tried to institute a rain tax, but it failed and was later repealed.

The bill calls for the creation of local or regional stormwater utilities, giving local counties and municipalities the power to collect a tax from properties with large paved surfaces such as parking lots, CBS2’s Meg Baker reported.

“With all the salt that we’ve had on roads recently, that’s all running into the sewer systems. So you can’t ignore problems because they don’t go away,” Senate President Steve Sweeney said. If the salt wasn’t used to melt the ice in a state like New Jersey, then the driving conditions would be very deadly.

Sweeney that most states have stormwater utilities that collect and filter runoff from the storms but those states don’t institute taxes on rain and the one state who tried it failed.

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As the financial situation in high tax big government left wing states gets worse, policymakers in Washington will have to start to ponder what to do if the unthinkable occurs and some of these states completely go broke.

About Andrew Aleksi-Lankinen

5 comments

As per the bill description, “While the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has adopted regulations requiring municipalities to manage stormwater, many municipalities do not have the resources to do so.”

So New Jersey already says we must handle rainwater, we’re just not doing it. When we do obey, they collect 5%. Ummm, sounds like a tax to me.

You will find that the bill does not institute a tax in any way, and only 5% of any fees collected will go to the state of New Jersey. The bill permits individual municipalities to institute a stormwater utility fee–meaning your town can, if it chooses, charge property owners for the maintenance it provides to stormwater infrastructure. In places where this has been done, the fees have been around $50 annually for homeowners. I was born and raised in central Jersey in a town where our stormwater infrastructure was over 100 years old and poorly maintained–meaning flooding, icy roads, extreme erosion in our rivers.

Most importantly, this bill does not create a tax and is does not do anything on the state level. This will not effect the finances of the State of New Jersey at all, and unless your town decides democratically that a stormwater utility would be useful, it does absolutely nothing. This is American democracy at work, empowering local municipalities to create the laws they find useful with some state help organizing efforts to make the process efficient.

How is that lifetime job with the local NJ municipality working out for you, Will? Just counting your days until retirement and moving out of NJ?
Of course this is a tax, and if you think any government in NJ will miss a chance to tax it’s citizens you have your head somewhere unpleasant. It’s a tax, 5%. Open your wallets NJ, they are coming for you…